


The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart- hearts are made to be broken- but that it turns one's heart to stone.

by MiserableLie95



Category: Morrissey (Musician), The Smiths
Genre: Implied Relationships, M/M, One Night Stands, Original Character(s), Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-25
Packaged: 2019-01-23 03:33:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12497800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiserableLie95/pseuds/MiserableLie95
Summary: Post-Smiths, 1988.





	The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart- hearts are made to be broken- but that it turns one's heart to stone.

Morrissey tried to get ahold of himself and take a sobering breath of the cool night air when he staggered out of a London nightclub on the arm of someone else, but as soon as he found himself leaning against the side of the building, trying to ready himself for whatever may come; he became cognizant of the buzz of voices, the dull bass booming from just inside the doors, high-heeled shoes against the pavement, fruitless cries for taxis, and the moment had gone.

Then there was a taxi, the door was opened for him, a decidedly difficult accent to understand in the drivers seat, and his relatively new address rattling off of his own tongue. He wasn’t sure if he had meant to do that, but it seemed too late for him raise any objections. Cold hands moved over his legs then underneath his jacket, searching for something that surely would not be found, and unfamiliar lips pressed against his throat. How long had it felt like things were happening to him without him taking part in it, making his own decisions? 

There had been dancing and a lot of drinks in a place where he had been camouflaged by people that he vaguely knew, in the type of place he did not usually frequent. This was where the stranger seated next to him came into the scene, slicked back hair, cuffed jeans, looking perfectly unconcerned with everything around him until their eyes had met under obnoxious flashing lights and the ceaseless noise of dreadful club music. Morrissey couldn't think of his name, but he supposed that at this point it didn't really matter. He just hoped this man wouldn’t remember him in the morning, and maybe then he'd be able to stop remembering things too. 

His movements were mechanical; handing over the fare to the cab driver, unlocking the door, hanging up coats, offering drinks that he did not have in his home. He knew it didn't matter, but the words came out anyway, almost without him realizing it. This man hadn’t allowed himself to be brought to a pop singer’s home for vodka tonics, and Morrissey’s polite insistence in skating around the subject tested his new partner’s patience. 

"There's only one thing I want, and I know what it is-" he drawled.

He moved closer to Morrissey, his hands splaying across the singer's back to hold him in his arms for a moment. They were nearly the same height, and the unabashed eye contact from an absolute stranger made Morrissey recoil slightly. 

"Where's your bedroom?" he asked. 

Morrissey led the way, and both his mind and the walls of his hallway seemed to be spinning. His partner joked about the grandeur of the room while he undressed, a broad chest and muscled arms visible in the light from the streetlights outside. 

"Hey- you're doing it again," the man said. 

"What?" Morrissey asked defensively. 

“You're frozen, like you were at the club, remember?" 

The man approached Morrissey, naked to the waist, and moved his large hands over Morrissey's arms reassuringly. Morrissey couldn’t remember much from the club, he didn’t want to anyway- but he had experienced more than enough of the exhaustive attempts of people who did not know him coming up to him in clubs and crowded pubs, trying to get him to dance, to lighten up; like his usual demeanor was some mask he was just dying to take off when someone came around and asked. 

“There's nothing to worry about. You're alive, aren't you?" 

“Well, my heart is beating,” Morrissey said. He had to try not to laugh. The man was trying to be helpful, the effort could at least be applauded. 

“So it’s time to start acting like it, isn’t it?” he replied encouragingly. 

Thick arms wrapped around Morrissey's waist, and the man pulled their bodies together roughly, undoubtedly impatient. He kissed Morrissey on the mouth, and Morrissey felt nothing, his heart sinking as the fact became increasingly clear. He felt nothing, not a glimmer of the attraction he had thought he experienced back at the club, and he wished he was anywhere but here. As he watched his partner kiss him, his hands moving along his body, Morrissey wondered who he was putting it on for. Who he was thinking of. Because surely, this was not about him. It the point of the night where a person who was used to such affairs did not care or notice whether or not their partner was entirely present in the moment. 

“Have you got a stereo in here?" The man asked, his lips against Morrissey’s collarbone. 

He had thrown Morrissey's shirt on the floor next to his own, and Morrissey looked down at his shirt sadly for a moment before returning his gaze to the unfamiliar man in front of him. The very idea of having a radio on during sex disturbed him, much less requesting it. 

"No," Morrissey said hollowly. 

“You’d think you’d be able to afford one,” the man laughed. “Oh well. We'll manage to make enough noise on our own anyway." 

He led Morrissey over to the bed and quickly divested both of them of the remainder of their clothes, and pulled Morrissey down with him under the sheets in a flurry of passionless kisses and wandering hands. 

It was supposed to be what he wanted. He had thought it was, anyway, which was why he had allowed himself to be touched and pulled close and kissed by a handsome stranger in a darkened corner of a dance floor while songs that he didn't like vibrated deep in his chest through the PA system of a club he hoped he'd never see again. Now, however, quickly sobering and with a stranger in his bed; he resented the hot breath against his face, the sloppy trail of kisses that were pressed against him hurriedly, obviously on the way to somewhere else- a means to an end. 

Well, that was one way of doing things. He didn't see how he could be upset that a stranger didn't show him the tenderness and affection of a familiar lover. He wouldn’t call this man a lover. Perhaps this man needed it like he needed it, but whatever the case was, there wasn't an ounce of love involved. It was strictly for pleasure, it was dirty, it had nothing at all to do with either of them besides the fact that there was some standard of mutual attraction and a desire for finding an escape from life between cold sheets. He closed his eyes and pretended he was someone else as a stranger's body covered his own. 

Morrissey tried to remember that this was what people did. This happened all the time, every night, all over the world. He had wanted to be wanted. He had wanted something where nothing was found, where no one knew a thing about all of the aching he had felt, who would momentarily deliver him from himself, from the torments of the past and of his own mind. That was how he ended up where he was. He tried to tell himself that nearly everyone did. It had never really been what he wanted, not really, but that was entirely out of his hands. He had to admit his failures at both living and loving, and the circumstances that brought him together with a stranger in his bed, unfamiliar hands moving along his body as though he could've possibly known exactly where to touch and what to say, on a dark night in 1988 came to mind readily. 

He remembered everything. He remembered the brightness of Johnny’s eyes on stages across the globe and in foreign hotel rooms when their bodies were allowed to be as close as they wanted to be, the way his hands felt on him, how they had come to know every inch of each other in heart, body, and mind. He remembered Johnny saying to him through a cloud of cigarette smoke with gin on his breath, naked and shivering after sex in a motel room somewhere during those first blissful stretches of tours in the early days of the group an answer that would never refute - that he couldn’t give him what he wanted, and to his credit, he never did. And what was that supposed to mean? He never received a full explanation. Johnny would just shake his head at him, his bangs falling over his eyes, and open his arms to him. He belonged to someone else. Morrissey never really expected it to change, but he didn’t think that it would one day bring him to inviting strangers into his bed to dull the pain. 

Another scene recreated itself in his mind, two or three years after Johnny had delivered the words that sealed their fate. He remembered coming downstairs one morning in his London flat the first day home from a string of gigs and finding Johnny sat in his kitchen at six in the morning, having used his emergency spare key to the flat to come in while he should’ve been in bed with the woman he had made his wife on the other side of the city. He had looked so tired, so weary at twenty-one. “I couldn’t sleep,” Johnny had said. His voice was choked with tears and so many words that he didn’t want to admit. “I wanted it to be you there next to me.” 

His life was not without love. At least he could say that much. For a long time it had been just him and Johnny. Endless days and nights running all over Manchester together and finding quiet pubs to drink and talk in before returning to Johnny's rented attic room to spend the night learning each other’s bodies. Criss-crossing the nation to be with each other again when one of them alternated between living in Manchester and London and then Manchester and back to London again. Then, there was the love of the crowds at the shows and the listeners of their group in dark bedrooms, unfailing admiration and unquestionable support which overpowered him at every show. 

But there was something lacking now, as a man he didn’t know trailed his fingers along the inside of his thigh. “No need to be shy now,” he said. There was no time to waste, it seemed, no further discussion necessary. The man parted his lips and took him into his mouth without hesitation, and Morrissey closed his eyes. He could hear the irregular patterns of his own breathing, hitching with a gasp, rising up for a moment and then evening out at another point, and focused on that rather than the stranger in his bed. 

This strategy worked quite well until he heard his partner say, “You like that baby?” And any hopes he had of getting through the hour or so that it took to reach the desired goal in bringing a stranger home immediately left him. It had been months since Johnny had left, but the wound that came with his departure was far from any semblance of being healed. 

“Don’t call me that,” Morrissey said darkly. He tried to laugh, but it got caught in his throat on the way out. 

“Didn’t mean to touch a nerve,” the man smiled. “Will you still fuck me if I promise not to do it again?” 

“I can try,” Morrissey agreed. He kept his tone lofty on purpose as he pushed the man back against the mattress. If he was honest, he wished he was alone, that this wasn’t happening. But it was, because that was where his life was at during this point in time, and he could at least give it a valiant effort while there was another person there. It wasn’t doing him any good sitting alone night after night, trying to build himself back up after Johnny had destroyed everything. He pressed his hands against the man's shoulder blades, pressing him down flat as he straddled him. He took a breath, and tried to pretend he was someone else. 

Afterwards, Morrissey reached over and called for a cab to save the both of them from prolonging their interaction any further. He felt empty, everything had been taken from him. He hardly had the energy to dress himself again, much less continue to pretend as though he could deal with another person right now. 

“What made you want to bring me home, out of curiosity?” the man asked. He had gotten out of Morrissey’s bed after the call had been made for a taxi and was beginning to redress, turning back to look at Morrissey as he buttoned his jeans. “A trick of the light back in the club?” 

“No,” Morrissey said quietly. “Certainly not that. You’re much too handsome for me, in fact.” 

“That’s not true,” the man laughed. 

“No? Well, I don’t know if I can give a satisfactory answer. I’ve been trying to convince myself to actually live my life, but as you can probably tell, it’s not going very well. I don’t do this often.” 

“Why not?” 

“Oh, you can’t tell? I’m just a boring old miserabilist. I can’t maintain this lifestyle, I can’t keep up the illusion that a couple of hours of drinking in a poorly lit club suddenly makes me talkative and likable,” Morrissey said. “I think you’d find that you don’t like me very much if you were sober, but I wouldn’t blame you. It’s me. It’s always me. There is no relief.” 

The man looked at him for what seemed to be a very long moment, doing up the buttons of his shirt. Morrissey was hoping that the taxi would be pulling up any second now and allow him to be alone again, but the stranger’s face softened, and he sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I don’t believe that,” he said. 

“I can assure you it’s the truth,” Morrissey said. 

“Well, I’m sorry to hear you think that. Have you got a notepad handy? You can give me a call the next time you’re feeling talkative and likable, because it worked on me,” he smiled. Morrissey handed him an unused envelope and pen from the bedside table, and watched as the man wrote down his telephone number for him. He was sure it was simply a polite courtesy, but for a moment the gesture touched him more than anything that they had done tonight. “There. Despite being so down on yourself, you know, you really are quite endearing,” he said, handing back the envelope. 

“Flattery gets you nowhere,” Morrissey smiled.

When he showed him out, Morrissey watched the taillights of his taxi until they disappeared. He didn’t feel much of anything at all. Something had gone out in him when The Smiths ended, and it showed no signs of returning. The one thing that brought him any semblance of peace was working, so that was what he had set his sights on. When he tried, every now and again to be with someone, to try to fill the void that Johnny had left, he found himself missing the guitarist more than ever. They still saw each other occasionally, but Johnny had begged him to try and move on, to focus on other things so that he could work, as he wanted, and he did what he could. Tonight, though, he felt sick with a desperate fury over the circumstances that he found himself in. Long ago he had found it necessary to create a sense of distance from the rest of the world, out of self-preservation, then simply of habit. The only person who had permeated that distance was Johnny. He no longer believed that anyone else ever would, and each unsuccessful encounter made him feel empty in his heart. 

He didn’t feel as though he could return to his room, where his sheets would smell like someone else from letting a stranger into his bed. He took a shower instead, and settled into his office, where the clock ticked half past four in the morning. He knew what he wanted to do, and after the course of events tonight, he didn’t try to tell himself that he shouldn’t. It had been months, but he was not content with where life had brought him after everything. He reached for the phone, and dialed a familiar number, knowing that he'd be awake. 

“I want a better story,” Morrissey said quietly. 

“Who wouldn’t?” Johnny said on the other end of the line. Morrissey could hear the flick of his lighter, and the familiar inhale of breath as he took the first drag. 

“I brought someone home tonight,” Morrissey admitted. 

“Yeah?” Johnny asked. Morrissey could hear him holding in the smoke.

“From a club. It's so tacky, I can hardly believe it.” 

“You don’t have to report back to me, love,” Johnny exhaled. “It was my idea.” 

“It was terrible,” Morrissey insisted. 

“You won’t find out what you want until you give it a good try.” 

“You keep saying that, like I don’t know what it is that I want.” 

“You don’t,” Johnny said. 

“Of course I do,” Morrissey cried. “If I had never known, had never felt the possible; there wouldn’t have been anything for me to compare these wretched, hopeless experiences to.” 

Johnny didn’t say anything, just stared at the cigarette between his fingers and listened to the sound of Morrissey’s breathing. His former partner was desperate for a life that they couldn’t have together, and it tore him up. The one positive Johnny could see was that it made the singer shift his energy into working, because there was no longer anywhere else for him to direct it. 

“You can’t keep trying to go back to who you were,” Johnny told him finally. 

“What else can I do? I didn’t make any decisions to end up like this- I didn’t have that privilege,” Morrissey answered. He sounded tearful, and he knew Johnny would notice, but it no longer made a difference. 

“I don’t know,” Johnny said. He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray next to his couch, and rubbed his eyes. “I’ve got to go, Moz.” 

“Goodnight,” Morrissey muttered thickly, but Johnny had already hung up the phone.


End file.
